In fact, the government’s petitions system has a very robust defence against automated bots filling in votes.

Each vote requires an authenticated email address and a verifiable UK post code in order to be counted. And the government took its system to task a couple of years ago after it was swamped with petitions following the original referendum result.

‘When the new Petitions service was built last year one of the primary design goals was to make it fast and accessible – especially on mobile devices where we get the majority of our traffic,’ explained Andrew White from the Government Digital Service (GDS), a unit of the Cabinet Office tasked with running online services.

‘This means that we can’t use anti-abuse technologies like captchas as they have significant accessibility, privacy and performance issues,’ he said.

A petition map showing whereabouts the votes are coming from (Gov.UK)

‘Any UK citizen wherever they are in the world can sign petitions, as well as any UK resident, so we can’t mandate the use of official IDs like National Insurance numbers for authorisation purposes. Therefore our primary tool for validation is a confirmation link sent via email.

‘Since 90% of our emails are sent to large providers like Google, Apple and Microsoft that have their own anti-abuse measures, we are generally confident that these are valid accounts.

‘This assurance allowed us to focus our search on emails coming from so called ‘disposable domains’, which are temporary email accounts that only exist for short periods before being discarded and can be created by scripts. We have a list of these domains but new ones are created constantly so it was just a matter of checking for these new domains.’

Also, the correlation of peak colouring to some very specific constituencies (of the 'Tiggers', Greens and strong London remain areas) show that it is unlikely bots are gaming the petition. Highly unlikely Bots would code in such skews in the entries.

Cyber-security experts also believe it would be difficult for a bot to influence the petition count. But not impossible.

‘This petition has generated a lot of signatures in a very short space of time. However, Brexit is a very contentious issue, so it’s not a huge surprise given the political situation at the moment that it has attracted a lot of signatures,’ David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, told Metro.

‘Technically speaking, it would be very difficult to automate signing of this petition in mass numbers.’

‘The fact that you’re required to provide your e-mail address, and then from this address verify you want to sign the petition, would mean that anyone wanting to spoof signatures would make it hard to do so en masse, using a bot.’

Could bots be involved in the petition? Experts say it’s possible (Getty)

Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of security firm High-Tech Bridge, believed it could be possible: ‘It’s relatively easy to influence such petitions with automated bots. Even if sophisticated anti-automation and anti-bot systems can help, they are not a perfect solution.

‘There is always a delicate balance between making it easy to vote and protecting the online petition from malicious actors,’ he told Metro.

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‘Additionally, external influencers may hinder the voting process by overloading the voting system and crashing it, or creating fake voting websites to make people think they voted, when in fact they have been duped. Therefore, such open petitions merely serve a non-binding indicator of a public opinion, and their authenticity and thus legitimacy is always questionable.’

A protester at the anti-Brexit demonstration (EPA)

Regardless, Theresa May has said she does not see revoking Article 50 and keeping the UK in the EU as an option.

‘If you look back to what happened in the referendum, we saw the biggest democratic exercise in our history.

‘And there was a clear result that we should leave the European Union. We said here’s the vote, what is your decision, and we will deliver on it.

‘And I believe it’s our duty as a Government and as a Parliament to deliver on that vote.’